June 2nd International Sex Workers Day

June 2nd of each year, is worldwide celebrated as International Sex Workers Day. It honours sex workers and recognises their often exploited working conditions. The International Centre for Reproductive Health (ICRH) at Ghent University joins this celebration and wants to express its solidarity with all women, men, and transgender men and women who work in the sex industry globally.ICRH, together with its affiliated organisations ICRH-Kenya and ICRH-Mozambique, has always been supporting the fight for rights-based health and social services, freedom from abuse and discrimination, and self-determination for sex workers.To this end, ICRH has conducted numerous research projects aiming at improving sexual and reproductive health among this population. ICRH had the lead in the DIFFER project (http://differproject.eu), that aimed to develop and test intervention packages to improve access to HIV- and sexual and reproductive health services for female sex workers in 4 cities in the South: Mombasa, Kenya; Tete, Mozambique; Durban, South Africa; and Mysore, India. ICRH is also a co-investigator in the Boresha project, led by Columbia University, that investigates the feasibility of venue-based HIV prevention activities for female and male sex workers and their clients in Mombasa, Kenya.Sex workers are a key population in the fight against HIV, and extremely vulnerable to a broad range of other sexual health risks, such as sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies, cervical cancer, and sexual violence. They are a priority population for ICRH, and we will continue contributing to the improvement of their conditions. We invite researchers and policy makers to reach out to us if they are interested in the work we do and want to collaborate or support our work in the future.